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Gesthemane: The Place Of Moral Loneliness

Our deepest loneliness is not sexual, but moral. More than we yearn for someone to sleep with sexually and emotionally, we yearn for someone to sleep with morally. What we really want is a soul mate.

What does this mean? Ancient philosophers and mystics used to say that before being born, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always, in some dark way, remembering that kiss and measuring everything in relation to its original sweetness. Inside each of us there is a dark memory of having once been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent imprint inside us, one so tender and good that its memory becomes a prism through which we see everything else.

Thus we recognize love and truth outside of us precisely because they resonate with something that is already inside of us. Things "touch our hearts" because they awaken a memory of that original kiss. Moreover because we have a memory of once having been perfectly touched, caressed and loved, every experience we meet in life falls a little short. We have already had something deeper. When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated or enraged, it is because our outside experience does not honor what we already know and cling to inside.

That dark memory of first love creates a place inside us where we hold all that is precious and sacred. It is the place we most guard from others, but the place we would most want others to enter; the place where we are most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of compassion and the place of rage. The yearning and pain we feel here can be called moral loneliness because we are feeling lonely in that precise place where we feel most strongly about the right and wrong of things. That is, we feel alone in that place where all that is most precious to us is cherished, guarded and vulnerable when it is not properly honored.

Paradoxically it is the place where we most want someone to enter and yet where we are most guarded. On the one hand we yearn to be touched inside this tender place because we already know the joy of being caressed there. On the other hand we don't often or easily let anyone penetrate there. Why? Because what is most precious in us is also what is most vulnerable to violation; and we are, and rightly so, deeply cautious about whom we admit to that sacred place. Thus often we feel wretchedly alone in our deepest center.

A fierce loneliness results, a moral aching. More deeply than we long for a sexual partner, we long for moral affinity : for someone to visit us in that deep part where all that is most precious is cherished and guarded. Our deepest longing, then, is for a partner to sleep with morally, a kindred spirit, a soul mate. Great friendships and great marriages invariably have this at their root: deep moral affinity.

The persons in these relationships are lovers in the true sense because they sleep with each other at the deepest level, irrespective of whether or not they have sex. In terms of feeling, this kind of love is experienced as a "homecoming," as finding a home, bone of my bone. Sometimes, though not always, it is accompanied by romantic love and sexual attraction. Always however, there is a sense that the other is a kindred spirit, one whose affinity with you is founded upon valuing preciously the same things you do. Such a love, as we know, is not easily found. Most of us spend our lives looking for it : searching, restless, dissatisfied and morally lonely.

It's this kind of loneliness that brought Jesus to his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane. The blood he sweated there is the blood of a lover, one betrayed, morally betrayed, hung out to dry in all that was precious to him. Nikos Kazantsakis once wrote that virtue is lonely because at the end of the day it is jealous of vice. He writes: "Virtue sits on its lonely perch and weeps for all it's missed out on." Not quite, but perhaps that's what it feels like. But the pain of virtue, while not immune to jealousy, is a whole lot deeper than Kazantsakis (and conventional wisdom) suspects. It's the pain of Gethsemane, of moral loneliness, the pain of not having anyone to sleep with morally.

One of the lessons of Gethsemane is that when we sweat our moral aloneness (without giving in to compensation or bitterness) we undergo a moral alchemy that can produce a great nobility of soul. "What's madness," Theodore Roethke asks, "but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?" True. And that madness intensifies loneliness even as, more than anything else, it opens the soul to the possibility of finally finding a kindred spirit.

Our Church

Jesus Our Shepherd is an independent community celebrating Eucharist in this contemporary, handicap-accessible rural chapel every Sunday morning at 9:30. We live the Gospel mandate of love as best we can. We invite everyone to Communion no matter ones life circumstances.

We warmly welcome newcomers, young families and children. Using what resources we have, we reach out in solidarity to people in need.